


Infinite Bourgeois Regress

by radishface



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Investment Banking, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-08 07:26:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16424975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radishface/pseuds/radishface
Summary: Inspired by the Irregular Office teaser.S.M. Lee & Brothers, L.P. is a multinational investment management firm founded in 1988 by Lee Soo-Man and based in New York City. The firm has offices in New York, Seoul Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Shanghai, London and Bermuda. S.M Lee & Co. has delivered the sixth-highest returns of any investment company in the world since inception.1 | the quant and the trader ± Taeyong x Jaehyun ± What is it like to want something?2 | the intern ± Mark ± He beat out hundreds of others for this internship.3 | the princeling, the partner ± Winwin, Yuta ± He’s paid to spot the trillion dollar opportunities.





	1. the quant and the trader

 

Around Jung Jaehyun I feel like a loaded gun in a bedside drawer. Next to him I feel like a raw wire next to a running faucet. Catastrophe imminent. On top of him I feel like slow motion and static. Connection imminent through the phone wire. Dial me in, hurry up. All I want is to hear his voice on the other end of the line. Reach through it and take his voice before it can pass his lips.

 _Dr. Lee,_  he breathes. _Dr. Lee, if you keep doing that, I’ll—_

But I can’t stop. I’m in the middle of a sequence. No-one can tell what goes on through my mind. I put my head down and run the query, check my code once more. I short out the circuits in my head before the thought of him can do something irrevocable to me.

Blank smile on my face. Keep coding.

Rewind, fast forward.

 

#

 

We’re out drinking with clients. To his right sits the CEO of XConCorp. To his left sits the Head of Finance. They’re going public this year. We’re out blowing off steam from a prospectus review.

There was a cold drink in Jaehyun’s hand. He has a way of looking like he drinks a lot, but if you watch him closely you’ll notice he doesn’t drink. Doesn’t lose his cool. Where the drink goes, nobody knows. The ice cubes in his glass melt and I watch them melt just like I’m melting. Drop by drop they slide against each other and clink to the bottom. Jaehyun’s whiskey was getting warm. His hand had nothing to do with it. As it got warmer the smell reached my nose on the other side of the table. Caramel, gasoline, warm.

Jaehyun doesn’t look at me the whole night. He’s a professional. When the CEO, drunk, swings his over my leg and pants into my ear, leering at my baggy suit, asking me where I got it, I ignore him. Just like Jaehyun ignores me.

 

#

 

Jung Jaehyun is the only thing I want these days. Five years at The Firm writing models in C and Matlab. The day Jung Jaehyun walked onto the trading floor from our London office with his fuckme eyes and his swagger I knew I wanted him to fuck me. He took his seat across from me and I threw numbers at him. He loved them. Wanted them on the floor yesterday. So that’s what I did. Threw them at him over the wall. His eyes sparkled everytime. And he got it. It was my job to figure out how the numbers worked, how to rewrite it in Python, add a backend database for audit trail and accounting, and slap a half-usable GUI on top of it. He didn’t push like other traders. Didn’t ever wonder what the fuck was taking me so long even though the demo was just working last week.

With a muted, controlled, strategic sparkle in his eye he’d smile at me and appraise my work. “Even before I joined the firm, I’d heard so much about your work, Dr. Lee. The firm is lucky to have an accomplished physicist such as yourself.”

Ex-physicist and aspiring university professor, but not all PhDs led down that merry road. My PhD happened to lead me down the road that was putty in Jung Jaehyun’s political savvy, carried away by his sheer charisma. I was a sucker for his movie-star looks. I was a fool.

It was the first bit of fun I’d ever had at the firm. I nursed my desire for Jung Jaehyun like a mother wolf. Sitting in a ten thousand dollar ergonomic office chair that felt like it’s squeezing me in tight I imagined Jung Jaehyun’s arms coming around me as he sent twenty million dollars into the infinite void. My face betraying nothing.

I wanted him to fuck me. Slow and deep and totally until I was abstract like numbers. I could see myself melting like the whiskey in his glass, high speed, lava hot.

“Hi,” Doyoung from infra pokes his head over my cubicle wall. He’s part of systems infrastructure. Before another word leaves his mouth I already know what he’s going to say. It’s always the same thing. He hasn’t bothered to compile my code. He’s going to tell me about the hardcoded pathnames and hostnames that should have gone into the config files.

“There might be some other things wrong,” Doyoung goes on, voice deceptively sweet. “Would you like me to help you clean up your code?”

I never wanted to be at the Firm. Not that what I wanted ever mattered, even to myself. There’s nothing I want in the world now except Jung Jaehyun to fuck me, turn me into saliva. It doesn’t matter that Doyoung wants to bury me into redundant, twicedone work or that the market opportunity I saw a month ago is melting away as our rival firms build their own models into production. It doesn't matter that minute by minute, my bonus is being arbed out of existence.

There days, I know myself keenly. Get Jung Jaehyun inside me, fucking me against the glass pane of my million dollar view overlooking the Hudson, and I’ll be done with life’s greatest pleasure. Best to savor that dream until I can’t anymore.

“Yeah,” I tell Doyoung. “I’ll get it to you tomorrow.”

“Take your time,” Doyoung drawls.

  
#

  
  
Jaehyun and I shared a cab home that night we took clients out. Turned out we lived in neighboring high rises. I didn’t want to ask him which way his view faced. If we faced each other, I didn’t know what I’d do.

In the hum of the Lincoln, half-asleep, he let it spill. Beyond the buttoned up Jung Jaehyun he presented himself as at the Firm. “To be honest, I want to retire,” he told me, “as soon as I can. I hate not being able to give investors the returns they want, even though I know those desired returns are ridiculous. I hate trying to deal with other market participants so desperate to make a buck to earn their bonuses they lie to my face as they try to screw me over. That’s what happened in London. Open-minded city, _sure_.”

I kept my breath to myself. My hands to myself. Perhaps he’d been drinking more than I thought.

“I hate the nonsensical regulations imposed post-credit crisis that actually incentivize us to take stupider risks because it’s not possible trade in a reasonable way anymore. I hate the constant stress and the feeling that I’m playing a stupid game.”

“What would you rather be doing?”

“I studied English literature at Cambridge,” Jaehyun said, uncrossing his arms. “It makes me a good monkey to parade in front of clients. They like the way I speak. But what I love is learning. That’s the only thing that makes this job bearable. At least I’m learning. In Western literature, the canon is the canon. It’s the same in physics, right? Once you have the rules, they’re fixed.”

I nod.

“But the bearable thing about finance is that everything changes. The interest rate models that were used ten years ago just won’t work now. Your job is to come up with new ones. That’s why I like your work. And once you come up with new things, the rules change again. And we figure them out, and make them work for us.”

Some silence reigned between us for a while. The Lincoln moved like a liquid panther in the dark.

“It might sound cliche,” I said, hiding my surprise at the raspiness in my voice, “but I wanted to become a professor.” They hadn’t been spoken in so long, hadn’t been confided in anyone. Jaehyun shifted closer to me and placed his hand on the empty seat between us. I could feel the heat emanating off it.

Jaehyun cleared his throat lightly. “Maybe that’s why we get along, Dr. Lee.”

“Please,” I said. “Just Taeyong is fine.”

But was “Taeyong” really fine? Did I cross a line? Maybe it was my own line that I crossed.

Outside, the city lights peeled past us. There was no traffic down the main artery at this hour. I wanted to make his dream come true. I was keenly aware that my body had some power over him. I had no idea what but I wanted him to take me long and slow and him to spend himself in me. I wanted to look at the way his neck peeled up into his jawline until I was dust.

Maybe then the world would be worth more than the sum of all the trades he’d ever done.

  
  
#

 


	2. the intern

 

 

 

At the end of a long and involved summer featuring a rotation of visiting aunties and uncles at various family-owned properties around the city Mark Lee finally found himself at LAX with his mother, standing at the curbside check-in watching his overstuffed cloth suitcase with a green Christmas ribbon (“so you can easily tell that it’s yours”, his mom said despite his protests) on the handle rolling away slowly on the conveyer belt, and his patience teetering on the edge of tomorrow.

“ _Mom_ ,” he whined, as she saliva’d a lock of hair behind his ear.

“Baby, can mom come with you?”

“But you don’t have any of your things with you,” Mark said, terrified that she wasn’t joking.

“That’s what money is for. They sell suitcases and clothes in New York, don’t they?”

“Mom, I understand that you’re worried about me. But I’ll be fine. Really. And you already came to New York with me over spring break when I had my interviews. You’ve seen the neighborhood. I’ll be _fine_.”

“You have no family there to take care of you!”

Mark distributed his weight from one leg to the other, just barely keeping from hopping. “Mom, there’s Haechan. He got an internship at the same firm, did I tell you already?”

“That good-for-nothing playboy,” she muttered. “He fools around too much with girls. His family has no discipline. They’re probably just letting him run amock. When you get there, the less you socialize with him, the better. Haechan has only ever wasted your time.”

Mark was the youngest and the only one in their family to go to a good college. Pride and joy of the Lee family. His older brother had fallen in with a bad crowd and never managed out. Mark saw him sometimes on the down low, but never left their encounters feeling good. His dad ran a laundromat chain in L.A. and had picked up English over the years, but his housewife mother hadn’t. Even though she annoyed him, especially at a time like now, Mark loved his mother. He found a smile somehow even though his lips just wanted to do one big squirm. “Don’t worry about it.”

“What do you mean, don’t worry about it? I’m your mother! Of course I worry!”

Mark switched tacks. It was never a good idea to bring Hae-Chan around her. “It’s just a summer internship, mom. I’m not even leaving the country. The time difference isn’t even like Seoul to L.A. And I’ll be back in August.” Mark tried not to wince as his mother turned her head away and hid her watering eyes behind her big Prada sunglasses.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” She muttered under her breath. Mark knew what she was thinking. She knew he’d wanted this internship more than anything. He’d beat out hundreds, hundreds of other applicants. When his offer letter came in — in a real envelope, on real paper, in a weight and a texture he’d never felt in his life, at the bottom of which floated a signature from the CEO himself, in navy blue ink so dark it looked black, he knew he was made. He was going to be working the summer at S.M. Lee & Co, L.P., one of the most prestigious hedge funds in the world.

His mother wanted him to continue on his pre-med track, attend medical school in L.A., and then practice in the area. She wanted him to do an EMT residency. But medschool would have been a drag. He just knew it. One of their family friends, Jung Yunho, had basically lost his soul in medical school. That didn’t stop his mother from loving Yunho and comparing Mark to him all the time (what middle-aged woman didn’t love Yunho and compare her son to him?), but clinical, robotic, barely-there Jung Yunho was the last kind of person Mark Lee wanted to become.

Mark lowered his voice and put a waver in it. “I want to show you and dad that I can be on my own and take just as good care of myself. That I’ve learned well from you. Don’t worry, mom. You know I’m the last person who would want to stay up late doing things I shouldn’t.”

“Mark,” she said, voice watery. She turned away. “You’re such a good boy.”

 _Maybe._ “I’ll call right when I land,” he promised.

His mother had insisted on a premium economy upgrade for him (“don’t tell your father”), and even though Mark was annoyed that she’d booked everything for him when he said he was perfectly fine doing it on his own, he was pleased about the upgrade. When he boarded the plane the attendants brought him apple juice and the taste of tart on his tongue made Mark 8 years old again.

On his first plane ride ever to Seoul, he’d ran down the corridor and jumped into the window seat. He was immovable. Eyes big and staring out the window for twenty minutes, head about to explode as he watched the ground crew shuffle orange cones around. _Are we gonna leave yet?_ he bounced up and down in his chair. His mother gave him her mobile phone to occupy him but for once he wouldn’t have any of it. So he kept bouncing and his mother put her head down in the in-flight magazine and his father, perennially exhausted and always somewhat far away, dozed the whole way there.

_Can I get you something to drink?_

Mark blinked. Looks like he’d dozed off too. He’d gripped his empty cup too tight and there was a crack split down the middle. A blonde flight attendant with her hair neatly tucked into a bun smiled kindly at him. Except there was nothing kind in her smile, nothing except exhaustion but Mark was too bleary-eyed himself to notice.

“Another apple juice, please,” Mark said. And now, with blue and white all around him and ten thousand feet between him and his family he breathed a sigh of relief.

If he had to tell the truth, he was used to earning his freedom like this. A little scrap at a time. With big eyes and a wide smile. A part of him felt bad that he didn't tell his mother the whole truth. After this summer, if this internship worked out, if he got a full time offer from the firm, if he graduated in one piece with full honors, if he had his way, he was leaving L.A.

For good.

 

 

 


	3. the princeling and the partner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yuta is paid to spot the trillion dollar opportunities.

 

 

If Dong Sicheng were being honest with himself, which he always was, because he could never be anything but, because there was much too little in his head to cause any noise or interference when it came to the truth, he would admit that he didn’t know half of what had been promised.

But Dong Sicheng was also more than happy to, if that were a concept for him, not that he knew what more than happy felt like because he didn’t know what happiness really was, because he didn’t think about it, because he was just happy when he was happy, to let things be.

A man with a head of hair and wide, unblinking eyes sat in the waiting area with his hands wrapped around the handle of a special edition, topaz-colored Rimowa carry-on. His white shirt was still crisp, and buttoned all the way to the top. His mouth, small yet plump, turned down at the edges. The overall effect was clean and distant, but unthreatening. That man was Dong Sicheng.

“Excuse me, Mr. Dong?”

“I am he,” Dong Sicheng replied.

Ah, the sound of planes taking off. Dong Sicheng closed his eyes. This sound he liked. It reminded him of summer vacation. It was one of the reasons he liked airports.

When he opened his eyes, the man who called his last name was still standing in front of him. The other man was very handsome. He had a big chin and a nice smile and his teeth were a large part of his smile. Something about his face reminded Dong Sicheng of a horse he had ridden last summer. Dong Sicheng smiled brightly.

“I am Nakamoto Yuta,” Nakamoto Yuta said.

“Yes, you look like him,” Dong Sicheng said, standing up.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Nakamoto Yuta said.

“It’s nice to meet you, too.”

Yuta wavered for a moment as Dong Sicheng stood stock still, like a mannequin. It was as if the boy were waiting for instructions. The New York partners had told him about the son of the Jiangsu CPC Provincial Committee Secretary. Born with one screw loose and a whole motherboard missing, they said. Should have been a pop star with those kind of looks, to an aspiring upper middle class family with the reputation bandwidth to put at risk. But he was a bona fide princeling. Under normal circumstances, the chances of someone like Dong Sicheng joining a team like S.M. Lee & Co. L.P.’s were one in a million.

(Literally. Yuta knew what one in a million looked like because that’s what he was paid to do—spot the one in a million, trillion-dollar asset opportunity.)

But the firm had its reasons, and so did the Provincial Committee Secretary, and so Yuta found himself here. Babysitting the bottleneck to a multitrillion-dollar asset. That might make Dong Sicheng himself a multitrillion-dollar asset.

“Excuse me, Mr. Nakamoto?” Dong Sicheng said, as they settled into their business-class seats. Dong Sicheng usually flew first class when he traveled with his family, but his mother wasn’t with him now, and he wasn’t too picky about whether he sat in first or business class. To be honest, and Dong Sicheng could only be honest, he was more fond of the food and the cutlery in business class. And he liked to be able to look across the aisle and watch someone else watching a movie. In first class on China Airlines the seats were all staggered, so you could not see anyone’s face (nor could they see yours). And thus fifteen hours would fly by, with no human contact.

Mr. Nakamoto looked nice enough.

“Yes, Mr. Dong?” Yuta repeated. It was the third time he had to repeat himself, but far from being annoyed, he was a little fascinated. Where in the world had Dong Sicheng gone?

“You may call me by my name,” Dong Sicheng replied.

Yuta looked surprised, and then smiled. It looked like he was trying not to laugh. “But I thought your name was Dong Sicheng?”

“My friends call me Winwin,” Dong Sicheng said.

Yuta hummed. “That’s an auspicious name. And why do they call you that?”

“So, you may too.” Dong Sicheng said, and then looked away. His mother told him sometimes it was best just not to answer the direct question. It made others think you had things to hide, which could be useful. His ex-girlfriend told him it made him seem more mysterious.

The flight attendant came over with two glasses of champagne. Yuta nodded and reached for a glass, but Dong Sicheng shook his head. “Sparkling apple cider, please.”

“I do apologize, Mr. Dong,” the flight attendant maneuvered the tray out of sight behind his back. “Your preference has been noted.”

“Champagne is fine next time,” Sicheng said absently. “My mother will have mine.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Well then,” Yuta said, once the attendant came back with a 250ml bottle of sparkling apple cider, uncapped and tipped into the same style of champagne glass that Yuta held in his hand. Sicheng—Winwin— watched with obvious joy and anticipation as the glass was topped off.

So the trillion-dollar asset bottleneck was a simpleton, after all. He seemed kind enough, though. And likely a true innocent. Despite himself, Yuta found his heart warming toward the simpleton and thanked God that the princeling he had hired into the firm was not a jerk.

Yuta had sworn fealty to S.M. Lee & Co., L.P after graduating from his Master’s program in computational biology. After his first year there he vowed to do anything for the firm. But he really hated jerks. It was one of the reasons he’d worked his way up to partner: to open the firm’s Tokyo office, and move home.

The loudspeaker crackled on. “This is the captain speaking. We’re just loading a few more bags, and then we’ll be on our way. Gates closing in 10. Flight attendants, please prepare cabin for takeoff. And to our passengers and Star Alliance members—thank you once again for choosing Delta. Relax, sit back, and we’ll be in New York in no time.”

Yuta rubbed his eyes. No, he really wasn’t looking forward to New York. But it didn’t matter what he looked forward to or didn’t look forward to. What mattered was that he put on a good face. And that was the easy part.

This was Yuta’s first visit to New York in the quarter. Every now and then he’d miss a few of the folks out there and wonder what they were up to. Lee Taeyong. Wondered how that kid was doing, if he had made any progress on getting more sleep at night. Kim Doyoung. If he was still as hot-headed as ever. Yuta coughed lightly to himself to mask a chuckle. Doyoung’s temper would get him in trouble someday, that was for sure. Yuta tipped back the rest of his champagne and wondered who the new summer interns were this year. Hopefully no MBAs. Hopefully they weren’t jerks. If he were really lucky, they’d be cute. But if they were too cute, Johnny wouldn’t be able to help himself. How would the office respond to someone like Dong Si—Winwin?

Normally, Yuta might be worried. But there was something so simple about Winwin it made him untouchable. Like a white rubber ball floating in space. Yuta coughed again to mask the sound of a chuckle.

“Have you been to New York before?” Yuta leaned over in his seat, adopting the stance of an older brother. Something about Winwin brought out his dormant paternal qualities. “Excited for your first day at the firm?”

But Winwin didn’t hear him. He was already deep into a Disney film, mouthing the lyrics quietly under his breath.

 

  
  



End file.
